Cracking the cold case: How two SPD detectives became ‘Detectives of the Year’

Seattle Police detectives Kevin Grossman and Chris Young took home Detective of the Year honors at the Seattle Police Foundation’s sixth annual awards banquet Friday for cracking a 1981 cold case. Casey McNerthney wrote about their accomplishment in today’s paper. Here, McNerthney gives us more on the case that earned them the honor.

The work of two detectives led to a first degree murder charge against Darrell Lowe.

Grossman’s and Young’s work led to a first-degree murder charge against Darrell Lowe, whom police say has DNA that matched DNA found on Wilma Williams, a 22-year-old articlecliplarge.JPG“>stabbed to death in her Holly Park apartment.

But for more than two decades, another man was a top suspect and was arrested in 1984 after police say he told details of the killing that only someone connected to it would know.

Grossman and Young said they uncovered how he likely knew those details near the end of their four-year investigation.

Sometime between when Williams was stabbed and when the detectives reopened the case, police purged the evidence — including the victim’s clothing and the homicide weapon. Grossman caught a break when the King County Medical Examiner’s Office found Williams’ DNA saved from 1981 and six sperm from the suspected killer.

Grossman and Young interviewed five top suspects, including the man originally arrested, who is now a registered sex offender.

All agreed to DNA samples, but none of them matched the DNA found on Williams’ body. And because police only had a partial DNA profile, they couldn’t check for matches in a criminal database.

On Feb. 2, a private lab was able to produce a full DNA profile from the six sperm and police say it matched the DNA profile of Lowe, who was being held in the Yakima County Jail on an unrelated theft charge.

Grossman and Young said interviews with Lowe’s two sisters gave them a missing link: Lowe had been a close friend of the man originally arrested. Police believe that’s how the man knew intimate details of the homicide.

The sisters told Lowe’s ex-girlfriend police wanted to talk with her. When she contacted Young, the woman said Lowe came home that July 1981 night with blood on his body and told her to get his clothes out of their Rainier Valley apartment.

“That was the last piece we needed,” Grossman said Friday, while Lowe sat in the King County Jail awaiting his March trial.

“I was just happy to hear they got somebody after all these years,” Williams’ 68-year-old father, Ed Williams, said earlier this year. “I didn’t think anything was gonna come of it.”